After a short career in stand-up comedy, Québec Premier Jean Charest now appears to be trying his hand at direct-marketing.

After abandoning bargaining talks with student strike leaders, Jean Charest and his Education Minister Line Beauchamp have taken to the airwaves to sell a new version of the hike to students/customers, direct-marketing style.

The pair sound remarkably like those credit card salespeople in kiosks on university campuses, trying to hook unsuspecting youth into too-good-to-be true deals with fine print that lands the cardholder a lifetime of debt.

With our new offer, you won’t have to pay 75% in fee increases over five years. We’ll extend those increases over seven years.* Why keep protesting out in the rain, when our new and improved fee increase will only cost you 50 cents per day?**

* The new increase is no longer 75%, but 82%.

** 50 cents per day only covers a portion of the fee increase for the first year of the seven years of increases. The increase in the first year would be $254. The government calculates that the increase really only amounts to $177 because tuition fees can be claimed for tax credits (even though many students don’t make enough money to receive the tax credits in question).

After ten weeks on strike, students are not taking up the Premier on his special limited-time offer.

This is a problem that cannot be solved with clever marketing. Students are not “consumers” of education. They are not “boycotting” a product.

Students are on strike, refusing to participate in the system that produces the labour force. They are on strike, not to save money, but to fight for accessible public education.

A large part of student strikers would not pay the full 75% increase that was originally to be imposed because they will finish their degrees before the full increase is to come into effect. They are not self-interested rational actors looking for a better deal. Students are not the selfish “spoiled brats” they are made out to be by the corporate media.

Québec students are acting in solidarity to save public education not just for themselves, but also for future generations. The only way for the government to end the strike is to take student demands seriously and go back to the bargaining table.

David Bernans is a Québec-based writer and translator. Follow him on twitter @dbernans.